I suppose a better title would be Breehabilitation and how to teach
Reposting because it got no engagement last time and I worked hard on it, please upbear uwu
Breehabilitation is not out of the question for many in our current time, but for a great number we can’t hope to do so (or even feel inclined to do so) until after we achieve global communism. We just don’t have the resources to spare for most hard chuds or nazis, let alone war criminals, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t still try: I’m sure there are many among us who found the left in such a way
The point isn’t to punish people for making the mistake, but to correct it so no further harm is done, I’m pretty sure we all believe this (talking exclusively of passive participants or hateful people, not war criminals and ruling class ghouls) as I’m pretty sure we all support restorative justice here.
I’m a firm believer that there are no evil people, only evil ideas and the consequences of the history, culture, and material conditions in which you’re raised. I sometimes find it hard to blame a kid who grew up in America for being reactionary sometimes as an adult, because often they’re not aware of it’s harm or even aware of the reactionary thought process at all, it’s insidious in it’s invisibility.
Breehabilitation isn’t the same as forgiveness, it’s reclaiming a valuable human life that was contorted into a monster through indoctrination, isolation, and fear. Restoring them to the person they always could have been were it not for hellworld
Discussions of breehabilitating truly terrible people is both too large and too far removed from the kind of breehabilitation I want to discuss, the kind we see most often in our everyday lives, I’m sure many of us have reactionary or neoliberal family and friends, and if you plan on organizing your workplace or community you can be damn sure you’re going to need this there too.
Our current culture often tries to essentialize both virtue and flaw, as in “I can’t be racist, I’m a good person!” As such, to a lot of people, being told something you approve of, participate in, or believe, is racist -such as supporting racist imperialist systems like capitalism or means testing- their immediate reaction is an emotional one. Rather than hearing that the idea is bad, they hear that they are bad, this is similar to the reaction to preemptively get mad at a vegan when they say they are one, because “if this person thinks eating meat is bad, then that means I’m bad, and I’m not bad, so fuck this person for saying I’m bad!”
Yeah, it’s a really garbage thought process, but hey so are most emotional reactions, especially ingrained coping strategies instilled in you from birth to keep you from noticing the contradictions inherent to the hellworld surrounding us.
I unoriginally call this manifestation of cope “The Firewall”
It’s a delicate balance to inform the person of the evil thoughts and beliefs they hold without making them feel attacked or accused, without triggering their Firewall. An important part of the process is walking them through how it’s not their fault for being indoctrinated or tricked or lied to, and to do it before the firewall goes up. Then you can teach them that since they know now the error of their thinking they should do their best to overcome it and grow as a person.
Yeah, easier said than done for absolute sure, but like everything this is a skill you can work at improving, with practice. Don’t go into any interaction with the intent to tear down someone’s worldview, you just need to get your foot in the door, find a place to stick your crowbar and give it some elbow grease. Overcoming brainworms is a daunting task at first, but over time it become a motivating force in and of itself, it lightens the load and makes accepting mistakes and growing because of them easier. It replaces the shame of not being better than you are with the energizing realization that you can keep getting better.
Breeing people from capitalism is the ultimate goal, but first we have to free them from the delusion that it’s good and that they want it
Have we ever actually gone deep into brainworms and what it actually is, aside from the thing we say people have when they have garbage beliefs? I think a good development of that idea could serve as a basis of operation for Breehabilitation.
Specifics like, what material conditions cause it, how does it become so bad it becomes destructive, etc. imo, I think that it's a subjective mental maze of ideology, built up out of the decades of cultural hegemony, a constant barrage of propaganda and existing within an age of an abundance of information and the post-truth bubble it creates where reality is more a consumption choice than a basis of shared experiences. They're probably aspects of brainworms I overlooked but if we take this seriously, it could be good for outreach and building trust and communication with people we want to raise the consciousness of.
I think the nature of people's firewall also has to be considered. We can't just go up to random people with wrong opinions and expect them to just go along with us. We have to get to know and understand someone before we start poking at their defensive mechanisms, however maladaptive they may be, especially moreso if we're recruiting for a mass movement because then it seems kinda culty lol.
At it's core, yeah we're limiting ourselves by not considering the further psychological basis for brainworms and possible ways of correcting them as much as possible under the current system. I think reflecting on our own introduction with our ideology comes into play as well but idk what else to say.
I like the idea of getting technical on this. It is clearly a path millions of people have gone down, and millions have been brought out if. So Yea, let's figure out and share how it's done!
It reminds me of the work of Werner Erhard. He developed a transformation workshop in the 70s that focused on helping people free themselves from whatever mental blocks they were having. I discovered it from learning about the Landmark Forum, which is the current holder of the "technology". Originally it was "est training" .
To start, one needs to want to change. They have to pay money and dedicate a few days for the group therapy. So already, that's seems not really useful for what we're talking about. But the work they do could lead to some ideas. Because it will fix your brainworms in a weekend. It's powerful stuff. It's a for profit business, so the word of mouth promotion model makes it look a bit like a cult, and it has a bad reputation along those lines. But that aside, there is something powerful there. Here is a page on the origin behind it.
http://www.wernererhard.com/est.html
That actually reminds me of this thing I came across when I was reading about Mark Fisher's Acid Communism called consciousness raising. Basically, feminists of the 60s and 70s would get together and just start talking about themselves, their experiences and how it connected to each others.
Consciousness raising groups – groups of no more than 12 women who met up regularly to discuss their lives – were the backbone of second-wave feminism. They provided it with a wide and thoughtful base of supporters and militants who examined their lives, took hold of their experiences, politicised them, developed theory based on them, and took action relevant to them. We hope it is clear that we are not just talking about consciousness-raising as a pedagogical method – of disseminating already-constructed theory, in the hope of marshalling people towards readymade action – but consciousness-raising as a radical tool for collectively creating theory and collectively devising praxis. There is a lot we need to learn that we can – and should – read in books (and archives). But there’s a lot that we need to learn which can only come from a collective and sustained examination of our own lives and experiences.
https://www.weareplanc.org/blog/c-is-for-consciousness-raising/
Reading through the esl page, I liked the focus on becoming the potential of humanity, not just being human because that's what we are. Having a shared reality and purpose would do a lot to shake us out of the malaise of subjectivism and individualism we're all trapped in.
Ironically, posting and chacha itself is kinda like that, developing a critical, common understanding for interpreting the world that isn't provided through the usual channels of mass media. Still, we're limited being as geographically decentralized as we are so this can only go so far. Putting a bunch of brainwormed people in a room in good faith with the right comrades and just getting to the root of all this mess around us could be useful when breeducating them, though.
"We could say that what happens is a shift in what orients your life. Ordinarily, what orients our lives is the attempt to reach satisfaction. It might be at a very low level an attempt to get food or water. At a little bit higher level it might be an attempt to be safe. But, at any rate, we could say that what orients our lives is the attempt to get satisfied, to be satisfied. What happens in the est training is that that gets turned 180 degrees around and your life is no longer about attempting to gain satisfaction. It’s no longer about attempting to prove that you’re all right. It’s no longer an attempt to prove that you’re satisfied. What happens in the training is that there’s a 180-degree shift to the experience of being satisfied, and now life, instead of being an expression of the struggle to get satisfied, is an expression of satisfaction experienced. You now begin to have what you do orienting around the expression of satisfaction instead of the attempt to get satisfied. And we could say that’s what transformation was." -Werner Erhard, Erhard Seminars Training, 1982
It's good. It's basically saying don't bog down in pursuing things to make you happy. Happiness is a choice. You just have to unlearn the mindset that convinced you that you need anything you don't already have to be happy.
(ahem. How does advertising work?)
The est process is designed to assist the participant to discover through experience, rather than analysis, aspects of his mental functioning and behavior. The participant "looks at" (without explanation or rationalization) his behavior, feelings, thoughts, history, justifications and the concomitant payoffs. The realization that previously unrecognized payoffs of apparently negative behavior cause the negative behavior to persist occurs here. For example, the person may come to experience the self-justification and righteousness that can occur when he is blocked, "put down" or dominated. As he gets a glimpse of what the mind has accepted as the payoff of these feelings, he gradually becomes aware of the patterns he uses to assert power and control in this situation. He now has the opportunity to see how this behavior allows him to feel "right" while it allows him to make others "wrong." He discovers how these old patterns and acts of domination reduce his aliveness and result in perpetuation of unhappiness and discontent.
What it's saying here is that our bad habits are often things we would rather do, say or believe because to fix it would require admitting being wrong. And our ego always chooses to be right, even if we hurt ourselves repeatedly, rather than changing the behavior and letting go. It feels good to be right. That overpowers the reward of improving anything.